This invention relates generally to bakery dough-shaping machines, and more particularly to a high-speed machine adapted to shape pieces of dough into the form of uniformly thin pies suitable for pizzas.
A pizza is an open pie made of thinly rolled bread dough spread with a spiced mixture, such as tomato sauce, cheese and ground meat, the pie thereafter being baked. The traditional pizza is made manually by working a piece of dough to cause it to assume the form of a thin, flat pie, the pie being then covered with suitable ingredients before being placed in the oven.
With the growing popularity of pizzas and the enormous demand therefor, the making of pies has become a mechanized bakery operation. Existing pizza-pie-making machines include hydraulically operated reciprocating platens supporting dies adapted to engage pieces of dough on stationary pans and serving to press the pieces into pie shape. In order to subject the dough to forming pressure to create a pie of the proper thinness, it is the present practice to spring-load the dies. The amount of pressure imposed on the die is determined by the springs, the hydraulic system serving only to bring the dies into engagement with the dough pieces.
The disadvantage of a spring-loaded die is that, as a practical matter, it is very difficult to produce spring pressures which are uniform through the operating area. The lack of uniformity generally encountered in existing machines, results in pizza pies which are improperly formed, some regions of the pie being excessively thin and others too thick.